The whole Minority Report style interface looks cool, but would you want to wave your arms at the computer 8 hours a day? I think a more usable futuristic gesture/touch interface would be a large multi-touch screen in a tilted drafting table-style desk maybe with a haptic keyboard at the bottom.
Or it could be used to add multi-touch to a screen tablet like the Cintiq in a way that lets the fingers be used in pen mode. This would allow the fingers to be tracked and a cursor (or cursors) moved while hovering,saving surface contact for clicking and dragging. Add a little haptic feedback for the items on screen, and it would be like the icons are physical objects you are moving with your fingers. Imagine dragging your finger across a spreadsheet and feeling the borders between cells as raised edges.
I'm not sure you can really get rid of hands-on-the-desk, upright-display because of ergonomics. If your touch surface had a 1-1 relationship to the screen, then it would come to feel like you are manipulating the display directly without your hands needing to leave the desk.
Any computer interface that requires more than small, efficient movements of the fingers and wrist is doomed to fail IMO.
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The whole Minority Report style interface looks cool, but would you want to wave your arms at the computer 8 hours a day? I think a more usable futuristic gesture/touch interface would be a large multi-touch screen in a tilted drafting table-style desk maybe with a haptic keyboard at the bottom.
Or it could be used to add multi-touch to a screen tablet like the Cintiq in a way that lets the fingers be used in pen mode. This would allow the fingers to be tracked and a cursor (or cursors) moved while hovering,saving surface contact for clicking and dragging. Add a little haptic feedback for the items on screen, and it would be like the icons are physical objects you are moving with your fingers. Imagine dragging your finger across a spreadsheet and feeling the borders between cells as raised edges.
I'm not sure you can really get rid of hands-on-the-desk, upright-display because of ergonomics. If your touch surface had a 1-1 relationship to the screen, then it would come to feel like you are manipulating the display directly without your hands needing to leave the desk.
Any computer interface that requires more than small, efficient movements of the fingers and wrist is doomed to fail IMO.